Thursday, December 29, 2011

Sometimes I’m reassured to know that I’ve married into the right family. Every year at Christmas my sister-in-law Leyardia sends us a food parcel. It contains a fruitcake and a Christmas pudding of her own making, along with some local produce, from where she lives, on Lopez Island, just off the coast of Washington state.

There are always some jars of Lopez Larry’s “Soon to be Famous” mustard sauces. These are good things – there are ten flavors in all that include Smokey Chardonnay, Dill Caper and Roasted Pickled Garlic. However, as far as I can tell the level of Larry’s fame really hasn’t increased much over the decade or so that I’ve been eating his mustard, which I think is a shame, and this despite “Soon to be Famous” being a registered trademark.

Also this year as a special, and surprising treat, Leyardia also sent two cans of Papa George gourmet tuna, actually troll caught sashimi-grade, wild albacore, cooked in the finest extra virgin olive oil, if the can is to be believed. I admit that the term “troll-caught” was a new one on me, but I now know that a troller is a small boat (somehow related to a trawler, I guess) on which fishermen use hook and line to catch fish one at a time, clean them and pack them in ice. All this is super-environmentally friendly and obviously a very good thing.

Even so, I’d have thought there wasn’t much you could do to canned tuna to make it gourmet, but blow me down, this stuff is terrific, really solid, tasty but delicate, in fact rather like beautifully cooked fresh tuna, but in a can. It seems way too good to put in a sandwich: I’m thinking salad Nicoise is the way to go. Here’s an illustration from the Papa George website showing how to fillet a tuna

But the real reason I thought I’d married into the right set of in-laws was the card that accompanied the parcel. Leyardia and her husband Charlie had recently visited the Mutter Museum, belonging to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a medical cabinet of curiosities, and also a chamber of horrors, full of skeletons, bodies in jars, casts of hideous deformities, and so on. The card she picked was this one:

The caption on the back reads “Mega Colon or Hirschprung’s Disease occurs when the nerve supply to a portion of the colon fails to develop. The muscles receive no signals to contract and move waste through the system, causing chronic constipation that leads to overdevelopment of the colon.”

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

So, the blessed Christopher Hitchens has moved on to a fine and private place. I never met him, though I know quite a few people who did. They’re divided between those who think he was the most amusing company anyone could ever have, and those who were introduced to him half a dozen times and on each occasion he behaved as though he’d never met them before.

I suspect that like all truly heroic (or do I mean tragi-comic) drinkers, Hitchens wasn’t really all that interested in food. He offered the advice that you should try to eat something at every meal, a funny line to be sure, but one that only a really serious drinker was likely to come up with.

Hitchens also writes, “Alcohol makes other people less tedious.” Now, only a fool would challenge Hitchens on the subject of alcohol, but my own experience is that alcohol makes tedious people far more tedious (if they’re the ones drinking it) and makes them utterly intolerable if you’re the one drinking it.

Hitchens also said that the only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament is the turning of water into wine. That’s undoubtedly a good miracle but I can’t help thinking that the business with the loaves and the fishes wasn’t too shabby either. Of course there is always the possibility that the feeding of the five thousand was actually metaphorical, about satisfying a spiritual rather than a physical hunger: sometimes the Bible can be quite hard work for those who insist on a literal interpretation.

It is surely the most meaningless or ironies that Christopher Hitchens died just a few days before North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. As you may have read elsewhere in this blog Christopher Hitchens once described North Korea as resembling a Christian heaven; a place without irony, art or privacy, with no respect for individuals, and where you're required to offer perpetual thanks to the great leader.

I’m not any more persuaded by the notion of a Christian heaven than Hitchens was, but if by any case we’re both wrong, I think we can safely say that neither he nor Kim Jong Il will be there.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Well, Diane Keaton has published a memoir titled, Then Again, and it sounds more interesting than the average Hollywood autobiography, and even her “food issues” (is there any actress who doesn’t have “food issues”?) seem more interesting than some, at least the way she tells it.

The story goes that while she was dating Woody Allen she heard another actress say that bulimia was a terrific way of staying thin, and she threw herself into it with abandon; putting 20,000 calories a day into her mouth, though never letting them be digested.

Her daily intake sounds truly extraordinary: for breakfast a dozen buttered corn muffins, fried eggs with bacon, pancakes and four glasses of chocolate milk. Lunch - three steaks with baked potatoes and sour cream, apple pie and two chocolate sundaes with extra nuts. Dinner: a bucket of KFC, several orders of French fries with blue cheese and ketchup, a couple of TV dinners, chocolate-covered almonds, a bottle of 7Up, a pound of peanut brittle, M&Ms, a Sara Lee pound cake, and three banana-cream pies. Oh yes, and some mango juice.

The ever-perceptive Woody Allen was impressed by her appetite, and seems not to have thought there was anything strange about it, though of course he did send her off to a shrink anyway to deal with her “insecurity.”

“The demands of bulimia outshone the power of my desire for Woody. Pathetic, but true,” she writes. And then one day, according to the book, when she was 25, she just stopped, and has been just fine ever since.

I mention this (and only partly in the cause of shameless name dropping) because I once had dinner alongside Diane Keaton, and it seemed to me that she scarcely ate anything at all, just played with a plate of salad, and she had a glass of red wine with ice in it. I, meanwhile, was tucking into steak tartare and O’Brien potatoes and I felt a bit of a savage.

However, Dian Keaton did say (and the way she said it, it didn’t seem to have been all that long ago) she’d been at a State Fair and eaten deep fried butter. At the time I, and I think everybody else at the table, found this extremely improbable. Now it seems a little less so.

Monday, December 5, 2011

I was flipping through Terry Richardson’s Diary – only metaphorically – it’s just a photo blog - and I came across some photographs captioned “Lydia Hearst at the Chateau Marmont.”

And the first thing I thought was, boy, that’s a really nice stove. The first place I ever lived in LA had a stove like that, if not quite as big, so maybe it’s an LA thing. Perhaps the Chateau Marmont retains the old stoves as a kind of retro design feature, but I don’t know if they get a lot of use. I’m sure I don’t know the half of what goes on in the Chateau Marmont, but I’m going to bet that not much cooking gets done in the rooms and bungalows, and certainly not the kind that requires a double oven. And certainly judging by the pristine state of the stove in the Richardson photographs, definitely not in his.

But then those photographs reminded me of some other pictures, the ones taken of Julie Strain by Helmut Newton and titled “In My Kitchen, Château Marmont, Hollywood” - they date from 1992.

Now this is perhaps what the critic Lawrence Weschler would call a “convergence,” although since I’m sure Richardson knows the Newton photographs, maybe it’s actually a kind of homage. I did wonder a first whether it might even be the same kitchen and the same stove, but as you can see, it’s not. The kitchen door opens the other way for one things, and the stove is actually rather cooler and more stylish in the Newton pictures.

The Newton kitchen is also less pristine, with newspapers in the trash (one has Newton’s picture on the front), a pot and a kettle on the stove, and most tellingly there’s a box of Rice Crispies in both the photographs seen here. The presence may look accidental but it’s been moved between shots. So is it a deliberate compositional element in the photographs? Or did Helmut and Julie stop and have a bowl of cereal halfway through the shoot? I’m sure there are ways of finding out, but in the wider world of photographic research it might seem a tad trivial.

However at the risk over over-egging the pudding here, if the Richardson photograph contains an homage to Newton, the Newton contains an (admittedly passing, and possibly ironic) homage to Fritz Lang. In the second Julie Strain picture she's rather delicately changing the hands of the clock. In Metropolis, Fritz Lang imagines something more robust is required.

I’ve not been able to find a picture of Fritz Lang in his kitchen, but here he is in a restaurant (or at least on a restaurant set) with Keith Andes, while making Clash By Night. The movie features Marilyn Monroe as Peggy, a girl who works in a fish cannery. Yeah, right.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Well, this is exactly why a man might run a blog called Psycho-Gourmet.

There’s a recent piece by the divine Elina Shatkin in Squid Ink, the food blog of the LA Weekly, about a book titled “Natural Harvest: a Collection of Semen-based Recipe. The headline says, “We threw up in our own mouth” which seems an especially interesting use of the royal “we” - plural throwings-up but into a singular mouth. Blimey.

There’s a quotation from the book’s blurb, “Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants.” And so on. The Squid Ink reaction is “blech, gag, barf.”

I think there’s a little too much protesting going on here. Come on, if semen is the worst thing you ever have in your mouth you’re doing very well. In any case, the book’s ontological status seems at best uncertain. Squid Ink doesn’t want to believe it’s real. I, of course, do want it to be real, though in fact I don't think it is, and that strikes me as a great shame.

You’d probably expect nothing else from a blogger who once authored a novel titled The Food Chain, in which a certain amount of jissom-ingestion goes on: mystery ingredients, magical elixirs, mystical essences, that kind of thing.

Perhaps what’s most surprising about The Food Chain is that over the years quite a lot of people have thought it would make a movie, including most famously Griffin Dunne. I once had lunch with Mr. Dunne at Chez Gerard in London to discuss the project. He was enormously late; not really all that unexpected since he was jetting in from Paris, where he’d spent the night carousing with Rosanna Arquette and others. I felt confident he’d get there eventually but I was starving, so at last, in his absence, I finally ordered.

At which point he arrived, flustered, windswept, genuinely apologetic, but dramatic and elegant, and looking quite the star. I said I’d just ordered, and without looking at the menu or asking me what I was having, he said to the waiter, “I’ll have exactly the same.”

The waiter and I were both equally impressed by that. I hope to do it myself one day.

LONDON CALLING

A jar of mint sauce leads to a rare experience for Geoff Nicholson
—commonsense and cultural solidarity while traveling by air

The last time I came back to America from England I got pulled over by security at Heathrow because the x-ray machine had detected something suspicious in my hand luggage. My bag was unpacked and out came the offending article, a jar of English mint sauce. The English security man looked at it and me sternly, and pointed out that since the sauce was runny and the jar was large, I was breaking the rules about how much liquid could be taken on planes. Of course, if I’d thought about it even for a moment I would have realized this, but the need for mint sauce had clouded my judgment.

The security man softened a little and looked at me with sympathy rather than hostility, as though I was an idiot rather than a threat. I certainly expected him to confiscate the jar, but I found myself explaining that I was an Englishman living in California and it was hard to get authentic mint sauce there. The man’s face cracked the smallest of smiles, “Well,” he said, “an Englishman can’t have his roast lamb without mint sauce can he?” I agreed that he couldn’t, and I was then waved through, taking my jar with me, having experienced a rare example of commonsense and cultural solidarity while traveling by air.

In general I’m not one of those Englishmen who lives in America and spends a lot of time feeling nostalgic about warm beer and Marmite sandwiches, but there are moments when I crave a Fortnum and Mason’s hand raised pork pie, some good English piccalilli, a nice pair of kippers and so on, and I’m clearly not alone in this. There’s a very curious scene in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye, in which Philip Marlowe, the tarnished yet noble private eye, has some thinking to do. He decides he needs prime rib and Yorkshire pudding, and goes to a Los Angeles restaurant called Lowry’s. Now I would have thought Marlowe was far too tough and all-American to be a Yorkshire pudding kind of guy. Great though it is, Yorkshire pudding seems a little too soft, frivolous and British for a hard bitten gumshoe, and this fictional moment just doesn’t ring true in the book. And I seems to me it was the author, Chandler, partly raised in England and very much an Anglophile, who was craving some British nosh, and placed the urge on his fictional hero. It’s hard to blame him.

There is no restaurant in L.A. called Lowry’s, and as far as I can tell there never was, but there is one called Lawry’s, and it certainly existed in Chandler’s time, though its location has moved since then. There you can indeed get prime rib and Yorkshire pudding, although in my experience the majority of the customers are unsure what a Yorkshire pudding is or how to eat it. Quite a high percentage of the puddings return to the kitchen untouched, which is a terrible shame. The interaction of well-beaten batter and sizzling hot beef fat in oven is one of British cookery’s most delicious and mystical processes. Lawry’s can certainly satisfy some of my yearnings for British food, and if it isn’t exactly a taste of home, it’s a decent approximation.

In fact Lawry’s, a small chain that now extends to Dallas, Las Vegas and Chicago, as well as outside America, is a respectful though not especially accurate, imitation of the classic London restaurant, Simpson’s in the Strand. The story goes that Lawrence L. Frank, the begetter of Lawry’s, never visited Simpson’s, but he heard reports that they carved beef tableside from grand silver trolleys, and this led him to create a version from his own imagination. I wouldn’t be the first to say that the imitation is rather better than the original.

Lawry’s doesn’t advertise itself as serving British food per se, and it’s not hard to see why. All Americans “know” how terrible British food is. They accuse it of being both bland and disgusting, not an easy trick to pull off. And the claim is that the food’s not just bad, but downright laughable. The jokes probably didn’t start with Mark Twain whose recipe for “New English Pie” involves a bullet-proof dough, several days of cooking and then petrifaction. And it certainly didn’t end with the Simpsons’ Mutton Chop Murderer episode, set in Victorian England, in which the killer is caught through his love of eel pies.

Old jokes and stereotypes die hard. The obvious way to counter them is to say that British food has seen huge changes and improvements in recent years. This is perfectly true, although I admit we British remain deeply attached to some quaint old delicacies such as spotted dick, toad in the hole and mushy peas, things that are never going to become hot favorites on American menus. But the biggest change of all is that the British, who once thought it was effete and unmanly to care what they put in their mouths, are now proud of their own gastronomic passions and connoisseurship.

The other way the British might counter the casual abuse of their national cuisine is to ask why, if Americans hate British food so much, they have such a love affair with British chefs. Jamie Oliver’s TV show Food Revolution just won an Emmy. Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck is about to be feted at the York City Wine & Food Festival. Fergus Henderson’s book Nose to Tail Eating, subtitled “a kind of British Cooking” was a smash hit with the pig’s trotter and marrowbone crowd. And there are times when it seems impossible to turn on a TV without seeing Gordon Ramsay joyfully cussing and calling people donkeys.

I find it intriguing to watch the contestants on Hell’s Kitchen struggling to cook beef Wellington—a thoroughly British dish—and I wonder how many of them knew what it was before they went on the show. For that matter, I wonder how many in the TV audience know even now.

It’s surely part of Ramsay’s success that he contradicts the received idea of the polite, reserved Brit. Whether he’s screaming at incompetent risotto-makers or hugging the newly on-track restaurateurs of Kitchen Nightmares, he’s nothing if not emotional. You also have to respect Ramsay for being the only British celebrity chef to open restaurants in America: that takes some nerve. It’s a surprise to go to one of his restaurants and find it’s a cool and sophisticated place, rather than a center of loud verbal obscenity and thrown food.

It must also be said that in Ramsay’s American restaurants, the Britishness is toned way down. Yes, on his menu at the London in West Hollywood you’ll find partridge and venison, at Maze in New York, there are some English-sounding desserts such as vanilla custard, and the London Bar, also in New York, offers “full English breakfast,” but he seems to be holding back. The website for London, West Hollywood, states that the cuisine is “western European with subtle Asian influences,” and Britain is certainly in western Europe, but Ramsey obviously doesn’t want to labor the point. The ox tongue and cheek, which is a signature dish in his British restaurants, and well worth seeking out, was only briefly on his American menus, which frankly is a damn shame: it’s a terrific dark, rich, gamey, very elegant concoction. There’s no beef Wellington on the menu either for that matter.

So if Gordon Ramsay isn’t going to satisfy our need for good British food in America, where should our quest take us? Well, there are quite a few, as it were, British “theme restaurants” scattered across America, various Britannia George and Dragons, Cat and Fiddles, along with an increasing number of gastropubs, a genuinely British invention that continues to mutate both in Britain and America. You hope these places will serve shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, maybe Cornish pasties. When these things are good they’re very good indeed, and to an Englishman even when they’re not really good they’re still not bad.

Some places may even serve curry, a British version of Indian food that’s a long way from anything actually eaten in India. The British have made curry in their own image, usually spicy but mild, sometimes creamy, occasionally extremely fierce, and generally accompanied by copious amounts of Indian bread. I suspect that not every American food lover will want to put too much energy into seeking out authentic versions of inauthentic copies of foreign cuisines, but if they do they’ll definitely be sharing flavors that are comfortingly familiar to millions of Britons.

Among the more interesting places where I’ve satisfied my urge for British food are the Lyons English Grille in Palm Springs—which serves a steak and kidney pie that’s satisfyingly heavy on the kidney, and sometimes they even have beef Wellington as a special—while in New York there’s Keen’s which certainly has British origins, as part of Lamb’s Club in London in the nineteenth century. There, as well as the famous mutton chops, you’ll find English trifle and Stilton from Neal’s Yard. High quality British cheese is certainly something that a deracinated Englishman often craves. It’s not impossible to find in America but here it’s a high priced luxury, whereas in Britain it’s an affordable staple.

And how about fish and chips? For the true British fish and chip experience you should be standing on a beach in a bleak English seaside town, the wind numbing your fingers as you eat the vinegar-soaked chips. It’s not an easy one to replicate in America. In southern California there’s the H. Salt Esquire chain, which is very authentic in some ways. The original owner really was named H. Salt (the H stood for Haddon), an Englishman, son of a fish and chip shop owner in Skegness, a bleak seaside town to be sure. The story here is that American tourists who ate at the shop enjoyed themselves so much they convinced Haddon that America would go wild for his food, and he duly moved to California. This may or may not be true: the hardest part to believe is that there were ever any American tourists in Skegness. I rather like my local H. Salt; the fish and chips are pretty good—they’re not haute cuisine, but fish and chips aren’t meant to be - and the layout of tables, counters and fryers really does have the feel a genuine English fish and chip shop, but the windswept beach is a long way away.

Much greater claims are made for A Salt and Battery, in New York’s West Village, with its English owners, cooks and sensibility. These result in chunky, irregularly shaped French fries, and crisp golden batter that doesn’t overwhelm the melting taste of the fish inside. One of A Salt’s fryers, Mat Arnfield, even beat Bobby Flay in a Food Channel “throwdown”: the fact that Flay used serrano chili vinegar certainly suggests he wasn’t going for authenticity. Fortunately he didn’t attempt the deep fried Mars bar, another A Salt and Battery specialty, one with Scottish origins, not as perfect an invention as the haggis, but definitely in the running.

Finally there’s one category of British food that’s absolutely unobtainable in America, and that’s game. A good local butcher in Britain will sell you venison, hare, pigeon, pheasant and whatnot, these will be genuinely free range - recently shot by a neighboring farmer. These are nothing like their farmed equivalents, however since such a trade would be both unthinkable and illegal in the U.S., in order to experience that particular element of British food, you’re going to have to travel to Britain, and once there you’ll be on a quest of a very different kind.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

I was in a Mexican restaurant t’other day, and there was some loud, annoying, full-of-himself clown at the next table making a song and dance to the waiter about how he wanted his margarita made with “top shelf” tequila and “top shelf” triple sec.

Leaving aside the question of whether the waiter was likely to add some top shelf saliva to the mix, the real issue here is surely that if you you’re a connoisseur of really good tequila, why would you mess it up it by putting it in a margarita?

In a lot of cases this whole top shelf thing strikes me as largely psychological. I remember the first time I saw and tasted Hendrick’s gin. I thought it was pretty special: I even convinced myself that I could taste the roses and the cucumber. More than that, it seemed impossible to find outside of fancy bars. But then it became available in liquor stores and now they sell it at my local supermarket. Its exotic status, and desirability, has declined accordingly. The incredibly irritating and over elaborate website has been no help either.

This has been on my because I was recently given a bottle of something labeled Uganda Waragi, by David Shook, the well-known mustachioed L.A. poet. He’d recently been in Kenya and had returned with the princely gift of waragi, which I admit I’d never heard of.

According to some accounts the name means “war gin,” while other sources say the word was coined by Sudanese soldiers from the Turkish “arak”) which sounds like a bit of a stretch. In any case it seems that waragi is the generic name for distilled liquor in Uganda, including home-made moonshine. There have been attempts to legislate that this distillation can only be done under licence, but “artisanal” varieties persist, and deaths are not unknown. The temptation to add some methanol to the mix is apparently too strong for some amateur distillers.

The commercial brand I had was made by Uganda Breweries, which is part of East African Breweries, and it’s apparently made from millet, and I was pleased to see that it was “triple distilled.” The companies make some efforts to market waragi as a fashionable drink, though this is slightly undercut by the fact that they also sell it in plastic sachets.

Anyway, you know, there was absolutely nothing wrong with this war gin. It was a little unsubtle maybe, not necessarily “top shelf,” and you probably wouldn’t use it in a very, very dry martini, but as part of an everday gin and tonic, what the heck? It was perfectly fine. What’s more, its exotic status is surely unimpeachable. How many folks in the neighborhood will be drinking waragi tonight? Forget the roses and the cucumber: taste that millet!

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

I ate at LA’s Osteria Mozza last week, the fancy Italian restaurant run by Nancy Silverton, Joseph Bastianich and Mario Batali. It was an interesting week to be in a Batali establishment since he’d recently been railing against capitalism (or something) saying, "The way the bankers have toppled the way money is distributed – and taken most of it into their own hands – is as good as Stalin or Hitler and the evil guys." Well this is a pretty dumb exaggeration if we take it literally, and at best a rhetorical excess. And of course, the occasional banker has been known to eat in Batali’s restaurants.

This being the case, and because he obviously knows what side his bread is buttered, Batali later apologized, by Twitter, naturally, "To remove any ambiguity … I want to apologize for my remarks. It was never my intention to equate our banking industry with Hitler and Stalin, two of the most evil, brutal dictators in modern history."

Well clearly it WAS his intention, but then he realized he’d been a dolt and regretted it for all kinds of reasons. And I do wonder which other “evil guys” he had in mind. Mao? Mussolini? Milosovic? Ah, those who don’t know history …

There had been some talk that bankers were going to boycott Batali’s restaurants, but L.A. doesn’t really base its wealth on banking anyway, and certainly business didn’t seem to have affected at Mozza. The place was packed, although we did get a surprisingly good table at a surprisingly reasonable time.

I wonder if it was because the Loved One and I were dining with legendary sports photographer and film maker Neil Leifer. He’s perhaps best known for his photographs of Muhammad Ali, some taken while he was still Cassius Clay.

I’ve been digging around trying to find some information about Muhammad Ali’s eating habits. There’s certainly this picture of him being photographed by Malcolm X at what looks like an all-American diner:

But there’s also an interview in Sports Illustrated from 1996 in which he says he adheres strictly to Black Muslim dietary laws, even though these apparently conflict with actual Muslim dietary laws. He says, "Our beans are crushed and mashed and cooked. We eat only whole wheat bread and whole wheat muffins … We don't eat any sweet potatoes, because they're not good for the digestive system … We don't eat lima beans and collard greens; these are hard, animal foods. We don't eat shrimp, catfish, crabs, lobsters, all swine of the sea, and we don't eat garbage-eaters like the hog on the land and the buzzard in the sky. We have a knowledge of these things, and once we start eating Egyptian cooked rice and Arabian baked string beans, carrot pies, squash pies, buttermilk pies, we're not at home with what you whites eat."

I’m not sure I would ever really have looked to Muhammad Ali for foodie advice, though along with Christian Aguilera he has no doubt done good works feeding the hungry in Haiti.

Neil Leifer is a great anecdotalist, seems to have been everywhere and met everybody, and frankly this was something of a distraction from the food in the restaurant. I ate crispy pig trotter with cicoria & mustard, and then rabbit with salsiccia, roasted garlic, lemon & rosemary. I was far too inhibited to take pics of the food but as usual, the Internet proves that others have had no such inhibitions.

The food was pretty great, though savagely priced, and a part of me wishes I could have concentrated on it a little more, though I wouldn’t have missed Neil’s stories for the world.

Eventually he got round to talking about Charles Manson. In the early 1980s Neil managed to get into Manson’s cell and take some photographs of him. Of course, he had to make nice for the course of the visit, and he knew that if he pissed off Manson in any way the meeting would be over. Naturally I asked if he found Manson as Satanic as legend has it. Neil said not. Neil is a short man, five foot six I’d guess, but he’s been around some very big scary guys in his years photographing sports, and he said he didn’t find Manson at all scary. Neil reckoned he could easily have whipped Manson’s ass should the need have arisen. It didn’t, but Neil got some great pictures. Apparently that swastika was fading, so Manson kindly redrew it with a ballpoint pen.

Manson had some strong opinions on food, as well as on everything else. According to one story, when he and the family were holed up in the Mojave desert he let the dogs eat before the humans, then the humans ate the canine leftovers. In his court testimony he also said, “You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are, and then you say how bad, and even killers, your children are. You made your children what they are … ” As bad as bankers, probably.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

I ate a lot of OK food in England: a couple of OK curries, an OK steak at Café Rouge, an OK all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet in Woodford, an OK Cornish pastie bought from a shop in Highgate. This is not a complaint, OK food is infinitely better than not OK food, but of course we always hope for more than OK, and fortunately my trip provided some of that too.

The best restaurant meal I had was lunch in the Rex Whistler Restaurant at the Tate Gallery. That's it above but it's actually a lot less daunting than it looks there. There was a “pre-lunch” section of the menu offering Colchester oysters and pork crackling with apple sauce. The crackling was some of the most extraordinary I ever ate, and I have eaten a lot of pork crackling. It was soft and melting on one side, tooth-breakingly hard and crisp on the other. How exactly did they do that?

And then for the main course I had teal. Teal! How often do you see that on a menu? It came with Swiss chard, parsnip crisps and bitter orange sauce and it was just wonderful, and it looked like this:

Actually it looked better than that. But then, after we’d eaten, I looked at the menu again and there in the starter section was a pheasant and rabbit puree served with acorn puree. Acorn puree! How often do you see THAT on a menu? The waitress assured us they were just ordinary acorns that had been boiled and crushed, but what a missed opportunity to eat something I’d never eaten before.

Boiling and crushing acorns sounds well within my skill set. And it so happens that as I look out of my living room window a see an ancient oak tree, that just a few weeks ago was heavy with acorns (also heavy with cavorting squirrels). I haven’t found an absolutely convincing recipe for acorn purée yet - I gather tannins are the big problem - and I guess the boiling leaches them out. Anyway there’s a project for next year.

The most joyously surprising thing I ate in England was Lincolnshire smoked eel with pickled beetroot and horseraddish cream (above). Now I know that eel is supposed to be endangered in some places these days, but even when it wasn’t endangered it was still pretty hard to find anywhere. Some of my family were Lincolnshire farmers, but they certainly never served up smoked eel. The fact that I ate this Lincolnshire eel in a fancy wine bar in Covent Garden called Terroirs, that also served Giuseppe Gualerzi Felino salami, ventreche “noir be Bigorre” and Cantabrian anchovies was especially pleasing. It suggested that Lincolnshire eel can compete with the world. (I’m assuming Cantabrian refers to the Spanish region rather than Cantab as in Cambridge, but in truth I didn’t ask).

The best meal I ate in somebody’s home was chez my pals Jeremy and Louise in Essex. Jeremy and I had been having some back and forth about the hanging of pheasants. As I recall, when I first started eating pheasant, there was a great deal of mystery about how long you hung them, and there were schools of thought that suggested the flesh was best when it had been hanging for ages and was alive with decay. These days I’m not sure that store-bought pheasants are hung at all. The one Louise cooked had had been shot by Jeremy the previous weekend, so it had only hung for 5 or 6 days which he reckoned wasn’t enough, and I could see his point, though it seemed perfectly good to me.

And then the next day we went to the coast, to the Essex Coast, to a place called Point Clear. It was the end of the day, turning cold and the sun was going down, and the beach there was scattered, positively awash with oyster. Some of them had already been attacked and cracked open by seagulls, but in no time at all I’d rounded up a dozen live ones and we took them home with us.

And you know, I’ve always liked the Richard Mabey, foraging, “food for free” thing, but I’ve never wholly embraced it. There’s always the worry that you’ve misidentified a poisonous fern or mushroom, or in this case that you’ve picked up a tainted oyster (not that you can’t eat a tainted oyster in a restaurant) and in fact I couldn’t tempt Jeremy and Louise to share nature’s bounty with me. But these oysters were great, and of course they were free. The Colchester oysters on sale in the restaurant at the Tate were selling for £2.15 each. So I’d saved myself the best part of twenty six quid. That’s a deal. That’s way, way better than OK.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning you’ll know that the title doesn’t only refer to the psychosis of eating, but is also a pun on “psychogeography,” defined by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." That’s him above, on the right with the specs.

So I’ve been trying to do something similar with food, examining the ways food effects “the emotions and behavior of individuals,” though I don’t believe there are “laws” in this area, precise or otherwise. Sure, we are what we eat, but what we eat is largely determined by what the culture makes available to us, the way the environment, natural or otherwise, tells us what we should and shouldn’t eat. So having been in England for a couple of weeks, I shall make a stab at describing some of the “special effects” I experienced while eating there.

My first stop was in Sheffield, my old home town. Fresh off the train I headed for the Showroom Café in search of a cup of coffee and a sandwich. But seeing that they were offering something called a Henderson’s hotdog (and especially given my recent adventures with Detroit Dogs and L.A. Street Dogs, op cit) how could I resist?

The Henderson’s, of course, referred to Henderson’s Relish (even more op cit), Sheffield’s own vegetarian alternative to Worcestershire sauce. I wasn't quite sure what was coming, but even so I got a lot more than I expected. I didn’t even know it came with chips, for instance nor that it came in a huge baguette. And although it wasn’t a huge surprise that it came with fried onions, I hadn’t expected them to be so coated, drenched, perhaps marinated, in Henderson’s Relish.

You could argue that the sausage (and I think it was a genuine sausage rather than a true hotdog, though I’m certainly not complaining about that) got a bit lost amid all the bread, onions and Henderson’s, but as an instant introduction to the joys of Sheffield cuisine, it was hard to beat.

A couple of days later, in search of Sunday lunch, we went to Carbrook Hall (that's it above), on Attercliffe Common, a formerly very rough part of town where the Nicholsons are supposed to have originally come from. Carbrook Hall is a formerly grand private house with a huge amount of history. It was built in the 12th century, rebuilt in the 15th, used as a meeting place by Roundheads, then more or less demolished in the 19th century, and what remains is a 17th century wing from 1620. The current Pevsner Architectural Guide to Sheffield describes the exterior as “unpromising” which is hard to argue with. But most importantly, the place is now a pub, allegedly the most haunted pub in Sheffield.

Again we’d have been happy with a sandwich, but it was a Sunday and the options were full Sunday roast lunch or no lunch at all. So we had roast beef and all the trimmings it looked like this.

It was a very serviceable pub lunch. There’s a big roast potato lurking behind the Yorkshire pudding, which was the best thing on the plate. We ate in the oak room, a wonderfully paneled space, full of ornate carvings, and a molded ceiling that would overwhelm most other rooms.

Above the fireplace we observed a carved panel showing a man, possibly a priest, standing on the body, or perhaps corpse, of a supine woman. Her skeleton is showing, although her womb seems to be intact, and she’s apparently pregnant, and she also has a devil’s tail. It seemed an odd bit of decoration to accompany your Sunday lunch and no less odd as decoration for a private 17th century home, but perhaps there’s a potent religious message there.

Not far from Carbrook Hall, a pub called the Noose and Gibbet was delivering a different though no less disturbing message. The pub commemorates the execution of Spence Broughton, in 1792, for robbing the Sheffield and Rotherham mail. The execution actually took place in Tyburn but his corpse was brought back to Sheffield and displayed in a gibbet for the next 36 years, at a spot not far from the current Noose and Gibbet. It was quite a tourist attraction, apparently.

In the absence of a real corpse the pub has put a waxwork figure up in the gibbet, at the top of a pole, like an inn sign, and from the road it certainly looks as realistic as you would want it to be. You might think that the sight of a hanged man or a pregnant corpse might be enough to put you off your food, but no, this is Sheffield, where people have strong stomachs, and they make extremely good use of them.